6 Ответов

The current generation minis don't have two internal SATA connections, like earlier generations. Instead, they have one SATA connection for a traditional 2.5" drive and one PCIe slot for a large solid-state flash storage. Depending on what you order, you'll either get:

The PCIe bus is much faster than the SATA bus*, so data transfer to/from the SSD is faster. The downside is, we've lost the ability to easily swap drives in and out. Although the PCIe interface is standardized, Apple is using special firmware on the SSDs using that socket; you can't just buy a generic SSD card and expect it to work, and you can't plug a traditional SATA drive into the connector. The price of progress...

If you're looking to get the most space available without losing speed, I recommend ordering the 1TB Fusion Drive. It automatically/dynamically stores the data you use most frequently in the SSD section, and pushes the data used less often to the slower mechanical SATA drive. Then, if you need more storage, you can offload to an external USB 3 or Thunderbolt drive.

*EDIT: And of course, flash storage is much faster than platter drive storage. I can't believe I forgot to mention that.

If I understand you correctly, then I think the answer is yes. You can format the SSD and the HD either as a Fusion Drive or as two separate volumes using Disk Utility. As I recall, SSD+HD in a mini automatically comes formatted as a Fusion Drive; if you want to reformat as two distinct drives/volumes, you would boot off an external drive, reformat as two separate drives using Disk Utility, then install a new OS on one of the bare volumes.

I don't have one of these myself, but looking at the HD replacement guide Mac mini Late 2014 Hard Drive Replacement it appears that it will support Flash storage + HDD, but there aren't mounting brackets where the flash storage would go to permit a second HDD.

Were you able to do this? I tried adding a 2.5" SSD hard drive to the empty bay and connected it to the SATA connector on the board. The mac mini still doesn't recognize the 2.5" SSD, I have tried 3 different SSDs, a 2TB, 1TB and 500GB. It doesn't seem to recognize it nor does it show up as a new drive via disk utility. Does anyone know why this is the case?

Related… I have a 2014 Mac Mini with a 3TB Fusion drive. Budget permitting, I’d like to put a larger (and hopefully faster) blade drive into the PCIe slot, and a 2.5” SSD in there to replace the platter drive. I won’t need the Fusion function at that point, 2 SSDs as separate volumes should be great. A couple of questions:

I understand that the PCIe slot is a proprietary Apple design. Is the OWC Aura product a working replacement for it, or do I need to order an Apple product from Ebay etc? I chatted online with an OWC rep recently and s/he said it would work, but I wouldn’t mind some confirmation of that.

Following adlerpe’s 2017/06/05 follow-up comment to his primary comment, I should be able to disable the Fusion function when booted up from an external drive by using Disk Utility to reformat the drives separately, right?

2) Yes, when you erase the Fusion volume, you'll be able to format each drive with a separate volume. I've occasionally heard anecdotal reports of Fusion volumes unexpectedly breaking, leaving two unreadable volumes which must then be reformatted either as separate volumes or as a joined Fusion volume. It makes one wonder how stable the Fusion system is, really.